21.3" LCD Monitor Reviewed

SLDave wrote in to plug his review of the 21" NEC MultiSync LCD 2110, the monster LCD that lists for a scant $3800. The largest Apple screen is cheaper, and I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time. And at the price of a decent used car? Update: 05/01 18:31 GMT by T : ARP has another idea, writing: "Here is a review of Samsung's 210T which is another 21.3" LCD. Not only is this cheaper than the NEC, but it also has DVI as well as RCA and S-video inputs that turn into a high-definition multimedia display."

Comments

Give us your worst, /.

[Cutriss]

We thought in advance to disable the news generator on the front page, so it won't go down in 30 seconds like last time.

Now it'll just take 3 minutes. :D

Your gettin' a Dell, dude

[Latent Heat]

Like Dell's got a 20" 1600 by 1200 for about $1600. No, I don't work for Dell, and yes, I would prefer a glass monitor because LCD's blow chunks when it comes to motion, although an LCD would be nice to stare at my source listings all day long.

Re:Your gettin' a Dell, dude

[moonbender]

While I'm of course happy for you that you like your LCD, I'd recommend to wait before buying one for motion intensive applications, such as movies or games. Two recent reviews of 15" LCD on Tom's Hardware Guide were still quite negative on that issue. http://www4.tomshardware.com/display/02q1/020114/i ndex.html http://www4.tomshardware.com/display/02q1/020322/i ndex.html

Re:Your gettin' a Dell, dude

[Waffle Iron]

I would prefer a glass monitor because LCD's blow chunks when it comes to motion, although an LCD would be nice to stare at my source listings all day long.

That reminds me of the storage display teminals I would sometimes use in the early 80's. Some of these were huge, like a 25-inch TV. The CRT had a special layer that would permanently turn on any time the electron beam hit it. You could only add to the "on" pixels; the only way to turn off pixels was to clear the whole screen. The TTY output would add to the screen until you filled it up, but you couldn't scroll.

I remember being able to view 400 lines of code at once on one of these. At the time, it blew away any other display technology at viewing code. The downside was, it really blew chunks at motion, since it was static. You could actually get some work done with a real line-based editor like TECO, though.

Oooh!

[Omnifarious]

I've been waiting forever for a 1600x1200 LCD monitor. I do all of my work currently on 19" CRTs running at 1600x1200. And, for games, where you want a lower res, the LCD pixel averaging thing doesn't work badly at all. I've tested.

No, when they get down to $2k, I'll start thinking seriously of getting one. :-)

Re:Oooh!

[roca]

Sounds like you want an IBM T221. For only $8000 you get a 22" monitor with --- most importantly --- 200dpi resolution (overall 3840x2400 pixels). I've seen it running GNOME and there's nothing like it. The main problem is that the mouse cursor is a wee bit small, and so are the fonts in a lot of poorly written applications.

Re:Oooh!

[nehril]

... 6400x4800 ... 1600x1200 is just barely enough
I guess the nosegrease smeared across your monitor as you press your face against it to read gives you free anti-aliasing? Or perhaps the radiation will cook your eyeballs enough to give you free "anti-aliasing" ALL THE TIME??

no offense, but I do like to keep my 19" monitor at a respectable distance, and 1600x1200 is just on the edge of overkill. Get a second monitor, or learn to use alt-tab!

A Decent Used Car???

[hansendc]

That is the nearly half the price for a modern luxury car!!! What more could you ask for?

swap?

[thanjee]

Anyone want to swap an NEC MultiSync LCD 2110 for my car? It's a pretty decent '74 Mazda.
Anyone?

awesome

[tps12]

I can't wait until these things are affordable enough, and high res enough, to replace CRTs. And when I am old I can talk about the "bad old days" when we had these huge power-hungry things we had to lug around. It will be analogous to people talking about punch cards today.

Also, CDs will no longer exist: pervasive networking will have replaced removeable media.

And no keyboards, replaced by voice/thought recognition.

And "paper" will only be used by some backward governments and lone survivalist types.

We will all wear white pants.

1600x1200 all day??

[qurob]

(From the specs)

Resolutions Supported:

Landscape:
720 x 400 @ 70 Hz
640 x 480 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
800 x 600* @ 56 Hz to 76 Hz
832 x 624* @ 75 Hz
1024 x 768* @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
1280 x 960 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
1280 x 1024 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
1600 x 1200 @ 60 Hz

Portrait:
480 x 640 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
600 x 800* @ 56 Hz to 76 Hz
624 x 832* @ 75 Hz
768 x 1024* @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
960 x 1280 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
1024 x 1280 @ 60 Hz to 76 Hz
1200 x 1600 @ 60 Hz

Re:1600x1200 all day??

[Diamon]

(From the review)

The last issue we had was that the display looked perfect at 1600x1200, but if you scale down to any other resolution everything started to look pretty bad.

Refresh rates?

[mindstrm]

Perhaps that's because LCD's don't have refresh rates? The are not driven by an electron beam scanning back and forth?

IF your LCD has a 'refresh rate' of 70hz that just means that the conversion circuitry that takes your analog VGA signal works at 70hz. There is absolutely no reason to make it work any faster, because the effect does not propagate to the visible screen...

Re:Changing res

[ergo98]

LCDs have a fixed number of "pixels", and the only way to change resolution is for the pixel driver to interpolate or some other trick : It can do this perfectly for for direct divisors of its resolution (for instance a 1600x1200 display could do 800x600 perfectly, simply using 4 display pixels for every 1 incoming pixel).

Re:Changing res

[ottffssent]

Depends what you mean. There are physically 1600 pixels by 1200 pixels, so if you want 1280x1024, some of the logical pixels will be mapped to 1 physical pixel, some to 2. Now, there's various blurring algorithms to consider, but it still looks bad. You could do 800x600 perfectly (each logical pixel = 4 physical pixels), but why would you want to?

Repeating myself and others....

[blankmange]

$3800.00 for a monitor (that has limitations pointed out by the rest of /.) is ridiculous! No DVI, fixed resolution, plus it is an LCD (cannot match CRT/Trinitron for crisp text, motion, etc). I would love to see their sales projections on something like this. Granted, there will be that handful of geewhizzers who jump on this, but the rest of us can make a complete system with $3800.00... easily!

Re:Repeating myself and others....

[fyonn]

okay, no DVI was bloody silly, there should be at least 2 DVI-I ports but lcd's are fixed resolution, thats just a limitation of the system. A ferrari can costs hundreds of thousands of pounds but can't go off road reliably, why dammit, for that kinda money I expect the thing to fly!

you see my point? they aren't trying to deceive anyone but it's well known that lcd's have a fixed resolution and tend to look ugly in any others.

crisp text? I've yet to see a CRT with text as crisp as an LCD. each pixel is discrete so text is as crisp as can be. old lcd's were crap at motion, thats agreed but new lcd's can be extremely good. the fastest pixel refresh rate I've seen is 25msec. my screen refreshes at 35msec and I've played quake on it with no problems (apart from my gfx card struggling a bit at 1280x1024 :). the display seemed perfectly able to keep up.

yes, it's expensive but it's also bloody big. there is a limited market but I'm sure it's not aimed at the consumer, but at business where they have the need and the money for these things. as time goes on these things will get even better and even cheaper but bleeding edge stuff always costs a packet.

dave

Dell 20" LCD is MUCH cheaper...

[gslobber]

I use a Dell 2000fp at work (21.1", native 1600 x 1200 resolution). It's an amazing display and can be had for as little as $1270 (see here for details). Even without the special offers, the list price is $1,599 -- half the price of the NEC.

"Useful for debugging Windows"?

[Wakko Warner]

So, you're the guy who does that?

Get back to work!! Stop posting on slashdot!! I hope they hire an assistant for you soon.

- A.P.

Those asterisks are there for a reason...

[AxB_teeth]

(also from the specs)

*Due to the interpolation necessary for
operation of LCD panel resolutions at
full screen, it is recommended that LCD
monitors utilize the full resolution
capability of the panel and are operated
at their optimal or maximum resolution
when text or fine lines are being viewed

Recommended Resolution:
Landscape: 1600 x 1200 @ 60 Hz
Portrait: 1200 x 1600 @ 60 Hz

Dead pixels

[wowbagger]

In the article, the author complains about dead pixels (though not loudly) and expresses a wish that NEC ship monitors without dead pixels.

It won't happen. Almost all lCD monitors have dead pixels.

An LCD monitor is, in effect, an IC that is several inches square. One flaw == 1 dead transistor == 1 dead pixel. Most LCD manufacturers will quote some number of dead pixels as "acceptable" - if your display has less than that many dead pixels they won't accept it back as bad.

The only way around this is to increase the number of transistors on the display, and design some redundancy - if one transistor dies, the others for that pixel will take up the load. However, since a transistor can die on or off, it gets to be very difficult to design the circuit such that no matter how the transistor dies, the circuit works.

Re:Dead pixels

[jeffehobbs]

As a point of reference, Apple's official pixel tolerance count for the new 15" LCD iMac screen is six -- you need to have six (6) dead pixels before Apple will replace the screen. That's why I always suggest to my friends who are interested in LCD monitors (or new iMacs) that they go to a store and check one out before purchase. LCD monitors are expensive enough that any decent salesperson wouldn't blink an eye if you said you wanted to unpack the merchandise and hook up the screen before plunking down your hard earned cash. If it were me, I'd even bring a burned CD with one of those LCD checking utilities that cycle through the RGB colors (then white and black) to give it the once over. Dead pixels are annoying.

~jeff

Might be worth the price

[billh]

I purchased an NEC MultiSync XP21 years and years ago. It was $2500 or so, way, WAAAAY out of my price range at the time. I thought at the time that not getting headaches and retaining my vision were worth the price.

Well, they were. Although it is a little dimmer than it used to be, I still use the monitor daily, at a high refresh rate, and my vision is still what it used to be. The only time I get eyestrain is when I am forced to work on smaller monitors, or on a system with a low refresh rate.

Sometimes things like this are worth the price.

Spend $500 more and get a 1920x1200 24" Samsung

[FreeUser]

NEC MultiSync LCD 2110, the monster LCD that lists for a scant $3800. The largest Apple screen is cheaper, and I'm not sure how I would feel about being forced into 1600x1200 all the time. And at the price of a decent used car?

I just bought a 24" 1920x1200 resolution Samsung SyncMaster 240T for $4200 (literally, I just got it yesterday).

If you are spending $3800 on a big monitor, for goodness sake spend the extra $500 and get an extra 3 inches in size and the ability to support true 1080i HD resolution up front. I work on 1600x1024 monitors during the day, and let me tell you, the added space 1920x1200 gets you is worth the price difference alone. The extra size (21" vs. 24") is also well worth the price difference.
And unlike the Apple monitor, it has standard video interfaces (analog VGA, DVI-D, s-video and RCA video, though the latter two are IMHO unimportant) without a troublesome dongle.

Driving 1920x1200 through a DVI-D port from an NVidia card under XFree 4.2 on a gentoo GNU/Linux makes watching those old Babylon 5 divx's a real treat (even if the increased size makes some of the artifacts visible :).

Samsung 240T question

[coats]

I'm getting a Samsung 240T. It's more expensive, but HDTV wide (I think 24" diagonal).

The TMDS hardware on the latest video cards seems to be honestly able to drive 1920x1200 digitally insetad of only 1600x1200 or 1280x1024, I'm ready for a flat panel.

--4of12

I've got one of these -- it kicks ass

--AC

Yes, the Samsung 24T is 24-inch diagonal. Judging from another post below, I strongly suspect Sun re-markets it...

Several current video cards will drive up through 2048x1536, including the nVidia ones.

On the other hand (and here's the lead-in to my question), this is nVidia's hardware support limit, and it would seem that there is an identical (but undocumented) virtual display size limit in the XFree86 nVidia drivers.

With a 240T, I would really like to run virtual on the order of 3072x2048. I've heard rumors that the ATI drivers don't have this virtual limit the way the nVidia drivers do. Is this true? Does anyone here have actual experience running 32-bit virtual screens as large as this on ATI or Matrox cards? It is just a little bit too expensive to buy one just in order to experiment and find out...

My demo 2110 review

[lhand]

What timing. We had NEC send us this very same monitor to demo for a month. Several of us are checking it out. The guy before me had it for a few days and decided he'd better not keep using it or he'll get too used to having it and won't ever be able to give it back. He loved it and now he's back to his 18" LCD monitor. I'm five days into a review of this thing and have mixed feeling about it.

I also have been using an 18" NEC LCD monitor until now and am impressed with the huge size of this thing. While the previous user used it on Windows 2000, I'm using it on XFree86 4. I like the amount of real estate it gives me to work with on the screen, but I noticed that it makes the bad fonts I have look even worse. (I don't have the antialiasing setup yet.)

I also, like the reviewer, noticed the abundance of dead pixels on the screen. A quick count shows fifteen I see without really hunting around. I kept trying to wipe them off until I realised that they wern't dust specks, duh :). I hope that this is not a QC problem, but just a beat-up demo problem. I think the dead pixels are a real negative.

Would I recommend it? Sure, if you've got the money to burn and find one with good pixels. Will I buy one for my personal system? Not anytime soon. Would I prefer to keep this to my current 18" LCD? No. The 18" is just fine for me. Plus, I'm planning to add a second monitor and Xinerama for the extra real estate.

We're ordering some of these for our network guys, though. For them, the extra space on the screen will allow them to better visualize the network status. I don't think the programming staff (me) will be getting any soon.

And that's fine with me.